During the last three decades, laser pointers became a necessity for presentations in business meetings, school events, and even public speeches. Laser pointers make it easy to highlight areas on presentation material that is usually hard to reach for the presenter by projecting a light spot in various colors—ranging from blue to green and red. These little light generators help to temporarily mark an area on a slide or poster, for which the presenter only has to move the projected light spot to an area of interest.
However, many presenters often find themselves in a pickle when they want to highlight an entire word because underlining a many characters is only possible by frantically waving your laser pointer, causing distraction to the audience and frustration for the presenter. Furthermore, adding words or drawings to slides or posters is not possible at all, and presenters have to resort to ancient technologies such as markers, highlighters or even adding paper scraps with adhesive tape to the presentation material on the wall.
In other areas, laser pointers have made technological advances. For example, US 2007/0023527 A1 describes a laser pointer that reduces hand tremors of a nervous presenter by counteracting the laser pointer's movement on a low scale. To this end, this laser pointer is equipped with an orientation sensor and a mirror system to invert the movement of the laser pointer, resulting in a more or less static laser spot on the wall. Additionally, this laser pointer can project predetermined shapes such as lines or circles by linearly driving the MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) mirror.
Unfortunately, these predetermined shapes do not allow the presenter to express his or her thoughts or artistic freedom as he or she is restricted to lines and circles. While it would be straightforward to pre-program this laser pointer for additional shapes such as rectangles or even star shapes, the presenter would still be severely restricted to the options of the laser pointer.